And why the Baftas will always be the Oscars' too keen little brother

The 2013 Bafta nominations, which were announced yesterday, got to enjoy just over 24 hours of luxurious newsworthiness before being eclipsed today by the Oscar roll-call. The Oscars are putting out their bunting earlier than usual this year in order to take some of the dubious shine off this Sunday’s ceremony for the Golden Globes. (The Globes, for those who just tuned in, are voted for by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association; in any reasonable person’s evaluation, they rate slightly lower than a rancid cuddly toy won at a fairground hoopla stall.) Any griping about the contenders proposed by an awards body amounts to nothing more dignified than playground name-calling. So join me now as I venture back into the school-yard to call someone else’s mum “ugly” and to brag that my dad could beat the crap out of yours (which is actually true).

Most Ridiculous Nomination

Bafta doesn’t have much going for it — the awards arm likes to think of itself as Oscar’s little brother, but you just know that if the two of them met at a party, Bafta would be all “Bro!” and Oscar would be, like, “Er, do I know you? Sorry, you’ll have to speak to my press agent if you want a signed photograph” before getting fist-bumped by Tom Cruise and Jay-Z while Bafta is grabbed in a headlock by security. But Bafta can stand tall this year and boast that it has waltzed off with the title of Most Ridiculous Nomination. Workaday awards bodies are content merely to snub and overlook, but it takes a unique brand of idiocy to amass the votes necessary to propose as a Best Actor contender Ben Affleck in Argo. It’s the perfect nomination for when you want to say: “Screw you, Jean-Louis Trintignant and your tremendous work in Amour!”

Most Pleasantly Surprising Nomination

The two Screenplay awards (Adapted and Original) traditionally offer slightly more space for innovation and daring than the other categories, so it’s perhaps to be expected that the two (unrelated) Andersons—Wes for Moonrise Kingdom (co-written by Roman Coppola) and Paul Thomas for The Master—get the nod from Bafta, with only Moonrise making it into the same Oscar category. For a true surprise we must look to the Animated Film category, where justifiable love has been expressed by both Bafta and Oscar for the marvellous stop-motion comedy-chiller ParaNorman (and, more predictably, the very good and tonally similar Frankenweenie).

The Tom Hooper/The King’s Speech Award (formerly known as The Ron Howard D’Or and The “Just Because You Liked the Film, Did You Have to Nominate the Bloody Director?” Prize).

Bafta makes it two in a row for Ben Affleck by suggesting implicitly in its nomination for him as Best Director for Argo that he is a more accomplished filmmaker than either of the Andersons (see above) or Steven Spielberg. In the case of the Oscars, Kathryn Bigelow, a previous Best Director winner (for The Hurt Locker), has lost out in that field even though her hunt-for-Osama-bin-Laden film, Zero Dark Thirty, is a Best Picture nominee. I’m a huge admirer of Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, but the idea of him competing for a directing prize with Ang Lee (Life of Pi) and Quentin Tarantino (the slavery revenge western Django Unchained), let alone Michael Haneke (Amour), is positively surreal, like seeing Bernie Clifton and his London Marathon Ostrich challenging Usain Bolt in the 200m.

The “Can’t We Make It a Tie-Breaker?” Award (coupled this year with the “Best Off-screen PR Angle” Award).

Squaring up to one another this year at the Oscars will be Emmanuelle Riva (Amour), who at 85 is the oldest Best Actress nominee in history, and Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild), who at 9 is the youngest. Now I like Riva’s performance very much. But I also think that Wallis’s is the best part of Beasts. So which one is better? There’s only one way to find out.

The Most Egregious Snub Award

You might say this should go to Bigelow at the Oscars. For me it’s the minor scandal of Steven Spielberg being ignored by Bafta. Yes, Lincoln is Tony Kushner’s baby (as I’ve suggested in the latest issue of the NS), so it’s only right that he has been nominated in the Adapted Screenplay category. But what a crime to overlook Spielberg in the Director category for his mastery of tone, his faultless pacing and the way he keeps the film balanced between human detail and historical sweep. I fantasise about a recount in which Affleck’s Bafta nomination is turned over to Wes Anderson while voters give Quentin Tarantino’s one to Spielberg instead, confessing that in all the hubbub they got their slavery films muddled up.

The “Even a Stopped Clock Tells the Right Time Twice a Day” Award For Good Sense Accidental or Otherwise.

A big hooray for the following at the Baftas: Bart Layton and his producer Dmitri Doganis nominated for their wily and gripping documentary The Imposter (Outstanding Debut By a British Writer, Director or Producer and Best Documentary); the smattering of amour for Amour (Film Not in the English Language, Director, Leading Actress, Original Screenplay); recognition for Lynne Ramsey’s vaguely Olympics-related Swimmer (Short Film). There are also some deserving names in the Bafta Rising Star category voted for by the public; these include Suraj Sharma (Life of Pi), Juno Temple (last seen in Killer Joe and The Dark Knight Rises—but check out Kaboom for her best work) and Andrea Riseborough, who was nominated either for her tremendous work in Shadow Dancer or for surviving Madonna’s W.E. The Oscars also get it right with their enthusiasm for Amour, which breaks out of the Foreign Language ghetto and into the list of Best Picture nominees. But it’s the title of an earlier Haneke film which sums up nicely this whole awards business: Funny Games.

Ryan Gilbey is the New Statesman's film critic. He is also the author of It Don't Worry Me (Faber), about 1970s US cinema, and a study of Groundhog Day in the "Modern Classics" series (BFI Publishing). He was named reviewer of the year in the 2007 Press Gazette awards.